


The Weight of History

by rexluscus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark, Death Eaters, Ghost Sex, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-06
Updated: 2011-07-06
Packaged: 2017-10-21 02:31:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexluscus/pseuds/rexluscus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young Severus Snape takes a peek inside a mysterious room guarding one of the Dark Lord's secrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Weight of History

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CS_WhiteWolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CS_WhiteWolf/gifts).



> Written for the Snape Rareslash Ficathon. Many thanks to Busaikko, Perverse_idyll and Regan_v for their input.

There was one door in the Riddle House that always remained shut.

The first evening Severus was summoned, he noticed the masked Death Eater standing guard outside the door. He was reasonably sure it was Lucius Malfoy, with whom he had the cordial beginnings of friendship in his other, daytime life, but none of the Dark Lord's followers ever acknowledged each other when they were wearing the hood and mask. Severus thought it was silly to act like you didn't know someone when you clearly did, but he was afraid to do anything that might annoy Lucius.

"You'll get your turn at this," said the man who might have been Lucius. "He keeps someone here around the clock."

Eventually he did get his turn. After a few unsuccessful attempts at prying the answer out of his comrades, Severus worked up the nerve to ask the Dark Lord, in as obsequious and unassuming a tone as he could manage, just what, exactly, he was guarding.

"A spell," the Dark Lord replied with an indulgent smile, as though Severus were a small child who'd asked about some obvious and everyday mystery. "A spell that allows me to…contemplate matters with greater clarity."

Ah. _That_ explained everything, then.

* * *

He lasted until his third night posted at the door before giving in to his curiosity. The lock, much to his ill ease, opened with a simple _Alohomora_.

The room inside was narrow and deep. A low banked fire lit the near end of the room, but the far end was in deep shadow. Severus could just make out the shape of an armchair next to the far wall, and above it, the glint of something smooth and reflective.

Severus passed the fireplace and ventured into the shadows. As he drew nearer, the glint resolved itself into an intricate gilded frame, which seemed to be framing nothing but blackness. The armchair, he now saw, was angled toward the odd picture-of-nothing so that whoever sat in it would have a perfect view. Severus sat down. This was what he'd been guarding for the Dark Lord night after night? An empty frame? He leaned forward, squinted, and for the first time he could make out the face and figure of a seated man. It was a portrait.

The man in the portrait was seated in a room nearly as dark as the one Severus was in—that was why the painting had appeared blank at first. But now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he could see the man quite clearly. And the first thing he saw was that the man was clearly a creature from a different age. Around him hung an air of forgotten customs and an echo of strange speech that was not just old, it was _ancient_ —as though the darkness of the painting were that of the beginnings of history.

The man's features were off somehow, alien in a way Severus couldn't identify, a bit like the stylized portraits of Ancient Egypt, but also with a simian quality—the short forehead, the elongated upper lip, the nose that sat high in the face and didn't protrude beyond the jutting chin. A long grey beard wound down until it became a snarled rope that brushed the tops of the man's feet. Folded hands were clasped across a narrow chest, spindly fingers interlaced and ending in long, sharpened nails. As Severus leaned closer, the portrait smiled at him, and a glint of yellow, unnaturally long canines made him shrink back ever so slightly.

The eyes, too far apart for an ordinary man's, followed him like a snake's marking its prey. They glittered in the primordial murk. "I think perhaps you are not supposed to be here, little one," said the painting. It spoke in English, but with a strange accent Severus couldn't place.

Severus swallowed. "No one told me I wasn't allowed." He forced himself to meet the inhuman eyes. "You aren't—going to tell _him_ , are you?"

"Not unless he asks," the painting replied with a serene but unreassuring smile.

Severus nodded uneasily. "You—you're Salazar Slytherin, aren't you?"

"I am." The haughty smile seemed to hold a world of unpleasant promises. "And you—I suppose you are a child of the snake as well? You certainly have the look of one of my chosen pupils."

"What look is that?" Severus momentarily forgot to mind his manners.

"Subtle. Solitary. Adept at taking the sideways approach."

Severus found the word welling up from the depths of his insecurity before he could stop to think about it: "Pure?"

The painting raised its tangled grey brows. "Oh, no—not pure. I can tell you're not _that_."

Severus wilted. So it was true, then—his filthy blood _was_ written on his face for anyone to see.

"While I can't say I approve," the painting went on, "I understand the necessity in your late era of not limiting the House of the Snake to those who are pure back to the first generation. Few can claim to be entirely without stain." Slytherin leaned forward in his chair and squinted slightly. "But your pollution—it's rather more recent than that, is it not?"

There was no point, Severus knew instinctively, in denying anything. "My father," he said softly.

"Ah." The painting gave him yet another one of those highly disconcerting smiles. "Just like your lord and master."

"Y—" Severus paused; he wasn't sure whether this was a trick question. No one— _no one_ —brought up the Dark Lord's heritage and expected to live. "Yes," he concluded lamely, unable to think clearly enough to lie with that unsettling gaze burning into him.

"And tell me, young…Severus, is it? Do you share the beliefs of your esteemed lord? Do you wish to see all Muggle-born witches and wizards wiped from the face of the earth?"

Not wanting to think about how the painting might have known his name, Severus nodded uneasily. He never liked hearing the Dark Lord's goals put in such overtly genocidal terms, but neither did he like to admit he'd been wrong, or misled, or deceiving himself. Never let it be said that Severus Snape let himself be used for any purpose besides his own—even if he had to outwardly agree to things that inwardly disgusted him.

"I see," said the portrait. "So does the thought of all your Mudblood classmates back at Hogwarts make you sick, even though you know you are half like them? Would you gladly see their bodies burn, knowing that had you had a different mother, you might be burning in their place?"

"I—" Severus choked on his reply. He reminded himself that this was Slytherin he was talking to, that _all_ questions could be assumed to be trick questions—that he'd chosen this path, and must now stick to it. Expressing doubt in the Dark Lord's house to his most important ancestor was inviting death. "I'm not like them," he spat.

"Oh, but you are. You are exactly one half like them." Slytherin smiled a toothy, bestial smile, and stepped down from the painting.

Severus nearly fell as he stumbled backward. He had never seen a painting do that before, never. This had to be a ghost—or worse, some kind of necromancy. The Dark Lord _had_ said "a spell" and not "a portrait" when Severus had asked what was inside the room. The tall figure, gleaming with a ghastly, morbid lustre yet quite obviously solid and real, glided toward him.

He hadn't known he'd still been moving backward until his back struck the door. Slytherin came on quietly, as grisly and graceful as a Dementor. Severus kept hoping there would be a limit beyond which the spectre would dissolve, a line between the living and the dead he could be safe behind. His fumbling hands couldn't seem to find the doorknob. Eventually, dry, sharp nails tickled the underside of his chin as the spectre gently lifted his face.

"What do you think it means to serve the Dark Lord?" the thing out of the painting asked. "What, precisely, do you think you'll be asked to do? Hand out pamphlets? Go door to door? Hold a bake sale?"

Severus shook his head. Slytherin was so close to him that he could feel the shape of a very real body against his.

"Do not make the mistake, little Mudblood, of thinking the coming war is about philosophy. What can one say of a man who has made it his goal to rid the Wizarding World of tainted blood even though his own is impure?"

He tried to reply but no sound came out. Which response was correct and which would buy him death?

"One can say this: a true Slytherin may believe certain things, but ultimately his loyalty is not to his beliefs but to himself, to his own personal power. He must be prepared to be a true hypocrite, to murder others as punishment for sins he himself is guilty of. Can you do that, Severus? Do you understand what you've truly gotten into bed with?"

Trembling, Severus shook his head, feeling the nails cut into his skin. He was no more capable of lying at that moment as he looked into those hypnotic, reptilian eyes than he was of declaring his undying love for James Potter.

"I see," purred Slytherin. "Then perhaps I ought to show you."

Hands as rough and cold as crumpled parchment slid under his thin robes and yanked them down off his shoulders with a single, loud rip. Fabric slid over his hips and pooled around his feet. The air, surprisingly cold despite the fire, raised goose bumps on his naked skin.

"Hm," said the ghost speculatively as it looked at Severus, its awful nails scratching lightly down Severus's chest and across his belly toward increasingly tender places. "Human beings are always so pathetic without their clothes. No animal ever looks so pitifully bare. But you'll have to get used to it. Just think of your clothes as those lies you tell yourself about why you really chose to serve the Dark Lord. Without them, you may find yourself pressed skin to skin with an equally uncovered truth. Shall we test how you handle that?"

Severus didn't even think to resist as the ghost—taller and more powerful than any human being, he now realised—lifted him as though he were a child and crushed him in a clearly non-negotiable embrace. Slytherin was all thin hard bones underneath voluminous robes that smelled of rot and mildew, and the ropey beard scratched against the skin of Severus's belly and thighs. It was horrible, it was embarrassing, it shouldn't even be happening because ghosts didn't have bodies to speak of, couldn't possibly do to him what it seemed was about to be done to him—

The world upended itself and he found himself draped over something soft but unyielding—the footstool belonging to the armchair, maybe. He didn't understand why he wasn't fighting. Was it because he knew it was futile? He was a wizard—he should know how to defend himself against all manner of Dark creatures. Was it a kind of perverse curiosity? Perhaps because he knew this couldn't possibly be real, not if the world still made any kind of sense? He had to be going mad; yes, that was it, the stress of his new responsibility as a Death Eater was eating away his mind. Somehow, that thought was reassuring.

The pair of cold, spidery hands with their scratching nails were running up and down the exposed arch of his body—smoothing over his flanks, tickling his quivering belly, scratching over erect nipples. It wasn't gentle, exactly, but it didn't hurt either. Every feeling, every touch of cold skin or bristly hair against his flesh registered with acute clarity, and he held still for it, frozen like an animal spotted in a field by a circling hawk. He didn't resist as his thighs were spread, and a dry tongue rasped over the sensitive skin around his genitals, then prodded at his opening. It all happened with such agonising slowness that he found himself holding his breath, held in suspense as the ghost advanced its slow-motion assault, brutalising him without violence, with simple teasing sensation that he could not block out.

It was almost a relief when he felt the stretching burn of something large opening him up. An absurd thought about how ghosts must not need to lubricate themselves floated through his mind until pain brought him back to the physical. Slytherin's cock was penetrating him slowly, not with sadistic brutality the way an ordinary rapist might, but slowly enough that Severus could not help but feel every moment of it, could not hide behind the barrier of pain. He gave a startled cry when a place deep inside him was touched and a jolt of astonishing pleasure coursed through him, followed by a burning wave of shame.

Then Slytherin began to thrust, and Severus could no longer name _what_ he was feeling. "There's a difference between you and your half-blooded lord," murmured Slytherin, his voice oddly unperturbed by his hard thrusts in and out of Severus's body. "Your lord hated his father for his blood. You don't hate your father for it—you hate yourself." He punctuated this with a vicious thrust and Severus moaned hotly, as though affirming Slytherin's words. "You hate yourself," he repeated, sinking his disgusting nails into the fleshy cheeks of Severus's arse, pulling them apart to expose the impaled hole further, "and that is why you allow yourself to be used and made a fool of by your lord—that is why you allow _this_." He gave another thrust that bent Severus's skinny body into a tight arch.

Severus gasped in bewildered pleasure, feeling the sweat run down his chest and thighs, feeling the indignity of what was happening to him but unable to think anything except _yes, yes, I deserve this, I want this, yes!_ He was dizzy from his head hanging over the back of the stool for so long, and his pulse pounded thickly in his ears. He felt drunk. He had lost all control. And there was relief in it, knowing he could do nothing, knowing he had to accept this punishing pleasure whether he wanted it or not. He went limp, too tired to stay rigid, to resist the invading force. He went as floppy as a doll tossed from a child's bed while Slytherin fucked him, his legs spread shamelessly wide, knowing what kind of humiliating picture he made.

Slytherin roared above him and finished in a terrifying parody of orgasm just as Severus convulsed, coming all over his belly and chest. His whole body shaking, he lay without moving as the sensation returned to his blood-deprived extremities, as the shock of intense pleasure faded and a nauseous numbness set in. He heard the gravelly chuckle of the ghostly figure somewhere off to his left.

"Do you know what the worst part of serving a man like Voldemort is?" it asked, with a voice like the dust on old monuments. "It's that his followers are just as self-serving as he is, but unlike him, they'll always be disappointed. Voldemort is an apt pupil of mine—he does not share power. So in the end, all you'll be left with is a lot of meaningless ideals you only ever adopted as an excuse, and nothing to show for them."

Severus continued to lie still, tasting bile and the salty tang of tears. "What are you?" he choked out, raising his head weakly. "Are you a ghost?"

"A ghost?" Slytherin laughed. "No, nothing so substantial. I am exactly what you think I am," he said with a cryptic little smile. "Everything I know, you know."

And with that, he climbed slowly back into his portrait and eased into his chair with a flare and settling of robes. Then he went as still as a picture in a Muggle museum.

Averting his eyes from the horrid portrait, Severus collected his torn robes and dressed with shaking hands. He was sure his face was a mask of shock; it wouldn't do for anyone to see it without its usual expression of bored disdain. Making sure there was nobody out in the corridor first, he crept out of the room and quietly shut the door behind him.

* * *

For a long time, he sat outside the Riddle House, wrapped in his cloak, hugging himself. Until now, he'd never really appreciated what was "dark" about Dark magic. He'd always thought of it as magic that weak and sentimental people were afraid to use—a subtle weapon that could turn on any wielder who lacked care and skill. He'd never thought of it this way before—as something that was simple _ugliness_ toward no particular purpose, just random and evil and _dark_. He understood what the word meant now. How could the Dark Lord keep something so awful in his house? How had Severus been so naïve as to think such things didn't exist, or that his master would eschew them if they did? How the hell had he gotten himself involved in this mess to begin with?

Perhaps if he was lucky, Dumbledore would forgive him, or at least be willing to use him. Perhaps he could salvage something of his worthless soul before he was swallowed by the infamy of history. All he knew was that he had to get away, an instinctive recoil like he'd have from the stench of decay or the sight of gore. He knew there was no one he could talk to about it, not even people he thought of as friends. He knew furthermore that he'd have to betray those friends eventually. But anything was better than the feelings those papery hands and sharp nails on his body had dredged up in him; and once he'd felt those things, there was no unfeeling them. He had to get away.

Later that night, as he tried not to think and plan, he sat on Lucius Malfoy's parlour sofa and swallowed his friend's brandy disconsolately. For the first time, he couldn't help bringing up the shared secret of their nighttime obligations. "I don't see why he needs us to stand constant guard over a room with nothing but a bloody portrait in it," Severus sniffed, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice.

Lucius looked uncomfortable. "Portrait? Severus…" He stepped closer and lowered his voice, and Severus's blood went cold at his words: "There's no portrait in that room. There's just a mirror."


End file.
